I learned SQL pretty much at the beginning of my career while working in an AML-related position in Garanti BBVA Bank. As a part of my job; I was receiving transaction dumps, importing them to MS Access and then analyzing the data using SQL to see outliers, potential patterns, etc.
During my masters, I had “DB Programming with PL/SQL” classes where I learned the relational database model properly and then all the other, more advanced SQL functionalities such as cursors, stored procedures and functions. However, I can’t say I used these functionalities that much considering my position as BA. But, I used CRUD operations pretty intensively during my career whenever I needed to fetch some data from tables, create test scenarios, solve issues, generate reports and call stored-procedures to initiate operations.
While I was in Istanbul, my employer was using MSSQL so I used SSMS to work on DBs, while in Dubai we were using MySQL so I used MySQL workbench for day-to-day tasks.